PalmPilot faces challenge for supremacy
San Jose Mercury - Posted at 10:02 p.m. PDT Saturday, June 20, 1998
Since buying a PalmPilot hand-held organizer several years ago, I've
used it mostly as a replacement for my paper address book and
calendar. But I could do much, much more with the device if I wished.
That's because its maker -- Palm Computing, now a unit of 3Com
Corp.-- did something smart. It turned the Pilot into a platform.
Think of a platform as a standards-based foundation, onto which others
can easily build new functionality. Many technology companies have
tried to turn products into platforms, realizing that they stood a better
chance of survival, or much more, if a self-reinforcing business
ecosystem grew up around their own offerings. While such companies
have strengthened themselves immeasurably in the hyper-combative
technology market, they've learned that it takes even more to assure
long-term success.
Personal-computer users and software developers have adopted
several platforms over the years, including the Apple Macintosh. But
when you talk about personal-computing platforms, you're
overwhelmingly talking about machines powered by Intel-compatible
microprocessors running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating
systems.
While anti-competitive business practices, particularly from Microsoft,
have played a role in the Wintel ascendancy, no one should
underestimate the importance of the Wintel standard's support from
third-party developers who have added their own ideas to the base
package. Because PCs were intended to handle many different chores,
the more flexibility they offered, the better they'd sell.
The PalmPilot was always meant to be a somewhat more limited
device, and it had major advantages over its competition. It was
pocket-size and served as a peripheral component to a PC,
synchronizing data with the PC but not trying to replace it. In the best
sense, it was an information appliance: reliable and easy to use.
But Palm Computing, after some tentative early steps, has worked hard
to ensure that other programmers and device-makers could make the
Pilot more useful.
And did they ever: Today, Pilot owners can find scores of add-on
software for the Pilot, most of which is available only from various
Web sites -- an intriguing web of interests, below the radar of the
traditional retailing world. Users can also add certain kinds of
hardware, such as modems, that expand the machines' capabilities.
I've added only one piece of non-Palm software to my Pilot: a free
program called LaunchPad, a replacement for the built-in program
launcher. I downloaded it from a World Wide Web site operated by the
program's author, Eric Kenslow
(http://www.nwlink.com/~emilyk/index.html). It's a useful
improvement over the original. For links to this and other Pilot-related
products, check out the company's Web site
(http://www.palmpilot.com).
Palm, Apple, Microsoft and Intel aren't the only companies to create
platforms, of course. Consider Adobe Systems Inc.'s Photoshop
program, a favorite among graphic artists and publishers for
manipulating images. From the beginning, Adobe successfully
encouraged programmers to come up with ''plug-ins'' that extended the
Photoshop's capabilities.
Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator World Wide Web
browser, once envisioned as an alternative platform that might even
challenge Windows, also encouraged plug-ins. And some still hope that
the Java language, with its so-far-unfulfilled promise of letting
programmers write a single program that runs on a wide variety of
hardware and operating systems, will become a significant platform.
Creating a widely supported platform isn't simple, however, because
helping third-party developers takes a lot of skill and work. As
Netscape learned and 3Com is learning, keeping a platform healthy is
even harder in a world where Microsoft wants its various flavors of
Windows to be the only operating-system platforms of any significance.
The Pilot, once the only sensible system of its kind, now has some
competition from devices running Microsoft's Windows CE operating
system. (Hand-held computers with tiny keyboards have always struck
me as nearly pointless, though they do have their fans.) So far, those
hand-held computers have been sluggish competition for the Pilot
because of Windows CE's limitations.
But it's a certainty that hardware performance will keep improving, and
a near-certainty that Microsoft will learn from its mistakes so far with
CE. Soon, 3Com could face a tough dilemma: whether to make Pilot
architecture become even more of a platform, in the broadest sense of
the word.
Wintel is just such a platform. If you want to make a Wintel computer,
you buy chips from Intel or its clone-making competitors, as well as
other chips and hardware from a variety of competitors, and you
license Windows from Microsoft. Literally anybody can make a
plain-vanilla Wintel PC.
Now consider what Apple Computer Inc. did with the Macintosh. It did
a decent job of encouraging software development for the Mac, though
its developer relations have paled next to Microsoft's industry-best care
and feeding of programmers. But Apple refused to allow anyone to
clone the Macintosh hardware until a couple of years ago, and then
gave up even on that modest attempt to expand the market when
company executives concluded that the cost of cloning was too high for
Apple's bottom line. Today, of course, Apple barely hits consumers'
radar screens when they think about which personal computer to buy.
I asked Donna Dubinsky, president of Palm Computing and a former
Apple executive, if it is time to open the Pilot to widespread cloning.
That is, should 3Com widely license its hardware architecture and the
Palm operating system? A few clones already are available, such as
IBM's WorkPad (actually a relabeled Pilot) and one from Symbol
Technologies Inc. that integrates laser bar-code scanning into the
device.
Dubinsky is acutely aware of the parallels with Apple, though she
doesn't think the hand-held market is much like the PC market. ''We're
creating a brand new business,'' she says.
Even if you buy the parallels, she says, her company is building the Pilot
platform the right way: providing support for software developers while
making a its hardware partnerships really count. IBM isn't a small
outfit, she noted, and Symbol is a leader in portable devices for
industrial customers.
Palm has limited resources. Throwing open the cloning doors would
stretch its developer-support system, she says -- and alienating
developers with poor support is the last thing the company wants to do.
The clone question is more a matter of timing, she says: ''a question of
when, not whether. Today, the market is really not big enough. If you
want people to invest they need a reasonable business opportunity.''
Yet the shadow of Microsoft and Windows CE is immense. A few
days ago, the developer of an upcoming electronic book -- a hand-held
display device, with limited data-entry capabilities, designed to hold
thousands of pages of text -- told me his company would adapt its
software for other hand-held computers. The first target, he said, would
be Windows CE systems. I asked, what about the Pilot? Maybe later,
he said, but over time he's convinced that CE will be the higher-volume
market.
Apple's experience remains high in Dubinsky's mind, and she's not
taking Microsoft's hand-held missteps for granted, but she exudes
confidence that the Pilot is gaining the strength it will need to retain
more than a healthy niche in an entirely new kind of marketplace.
''You don't want to repeat the mistakes of the past,'' she says, ''but you
don't want to misinterpret the past, either.''
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